America’s Days of Rage; a History of Violence
The violent riots waged in American cities by groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter is nothing out of the ordinary when viewed against the backdrop of ongoing left wing terrorism between the Nineteen Sixties through to the Eighties.
A good example of this not-too-distant-past is terrorist Susan Rosenberg who sits on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, a registered 501C3 charity, and funding arm of the B.L.M. Global Network.
Rosenberg convicted in 1984 for possession of weapons slash explosives and sentenced to 58 years imprisonment was guilty of advocating for the overthrow of the U.S. government according to an FBI source.
She was also a Member of the May19 Communist Organization (M19CO) who provided support to an offshoot of the Black Liberation Army, carried out armored truck robberies and bombed government buildings.
Also, suspected as an accomplice in the 1979-prison escape of Assanta Skhakur and the 1981 Brinks robbery resulting in the deaths of two police officers and a guard, the court didn’t charge Rosenberg in either of these cases.
President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence in 2001 on his last day in office.
Both Antifa and BLM are overrepresented by white faces; with the second exclusively staffed by college undergraduate white women, so much for representation, but it isn’t about input either rather following a selective script, so nothing new here.
The difference now is political identity groups operate under an umbrella alliance and adopt each other’s cause at the same time they promote their own.
As the rhetoric and physical violence ratchet up, it is time to re-explore the “days of rage” period of American history.
What started as a non-violent student movement quickly escalated into a campaign of terrorism against Americans.
While the similarities may not be striking, astute people will see the world in which we live more and more resembling those times.
Three days of demonstrations took place on October 8 through to the 11 of 1969, a sort of “coming out” party for the Weathermen or Weather Underground Movement.
The Way it Was
The Weathermen started out as a faction inside Students for a Democratic Society.
This period of leftist terrorism has its genesis in a faction fight between the Weathermen, who controlled the national SDS organization, and the rest of their faction (known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement II or RYM II), who were in opposition to the more classically Maoist Worker Student Alliance.
Tensions ran high because the stakes were high — nothing less than total control of the largest student radical organization in America and all of the spoils that came along with that.
Many inside the Weathermen faction of RYM II believed they were fighting fascism in America in the form of President Richard Nixon.
Does that sound familiar yet?
Then, a statue memorializing a police officer killed during the 1886 Hay market riots detonated on October 6 1969.
Law enforcement never found those responsible but this act split the Weather Underground from the rest of the SDS.
The Weathermen then shifted their activity to the Days of Rage, a protest rally with the slogans “Bring the War Home!” Many wielded lead pipes and were clad in football helmets, ready for a confrontation with the police.
The turnout was disappointing but hardcore weathermen shifted the goal to fighting the police.
Jeff Jones one of the leaders of the Weathermen, then gave the signal and chaos erupted. The crowd moved through the city, smashing windows of ordinary cars and middle-class homes throughout Chicago, as well as small businesses like barber shops.
The next day, a “Women’s Militia” comprising of about 70 female Weathermen planned to attack a draft board office, but the Chicago Police Department stopped them.
The governor responded quickly, calling up 2,500 National Guard members to protect Chicago ending in the cancellation of the protests.
After the Days of Rage protests, the weathermen went underground, thus their new name, as they vowed to continue with guerrilla warfare against the U.S.
The ideology of this group is interesting as they weren’t classical Marxists or Maoists; they focused on opposition to the American state, white supremacy and white privilege not class distinctions, they were in essence the new left of today.
This doesn’t mean communists don’t use the tools of the new left aka political identities to gain advantage.
In the first year of going underground, the weathermen engaged in bombing campaigns throughout the U.S before disbanding in 1977.
Now as Then
The Sunrise Movement, an activist group supporting global climate change and its goals has called for a nationwide 100-day siege to escalate civil unrest leading up to this year’s elections.
